I don't necessarily have a problem with people making long reply-chains, but I don't like the fact that with the board in bump mode at the minute, that leads to the conversations being kept on the front page. If they disappeared as new threads were added, I don't think I'd mind at all.

Given that we are in bump mode, I don't think there's anything wrong with handing out reminders when needed. As for why I've never been the one to give the reminder if I feel like this, I'm blaming that on the time difference. As far as I can remember, whenever it's come up so far someone else (and yeah, I think it has been July most, if not all, of the time) has already taken care of it. As Phobos said, it should only take one person saying it for it to be effective.

I don't think rambling is bad. What I think is bad is when a couple of people use the board to have an extended conversation, rather than using the chat (or some other means of communication). I am of course aware that all of the Big Annoying Threads (BATs) have started as ramblings, but plenty of ramblings have not spawned BATs and in theory a BAT could just as well consist of a couple of boarders having a long and serious debate, say, about whether being human shaped or not means something for a characters personhood, and it would be equally annoying.

The real problem - as I see it - is people not taking their conversation to the chat, rather than the subject they are conversing about.
I mean, JulyFlame had to tell people to please stop posting in the shipfest thread and nobody is suggesting that shipfest threads are bad. So why should we say that rambling is bad, when most people are perfectly capable of rambling responsibly and it's just a few once in a while who need a polite but firm suggestion to take it to the IRC?

Also, I believe that if we make it a habit to tell people, 'your thread is getting long, please take this to the IRC' rather than 'please stop rambling, you're clogging up the board' we won't have to worry about whether it is okay to make the IRC suggestion to a serious discussion, which is getting long, or deal with people being confused or upset because 'but we weren't rambling, we were having a perfectly serious discussion about where the line is between a poetic death and torture'.

However, that was not what July said. What she said, in her subject line, to two people who were not doing any of that, was 'Rambling is bad.'. She didn't qualify that with a 'I mean', but with an 'especially' - indicating that rambling is always bad, and more so when certain conditions - which I acknowledged are open to debate - are met.

And yeah - you can speak for yourself, I can speak for myself, July can speak for herself. July thinks she needs to say something, you think you don't need to add your voice, I think it's not worth saying anything. But we're just three regular people, whatever impressions recent elections may give any observers. What does the Board At Large think? You, me and July don't know. Hence my suggestion that we survey the general mood.

hS

It probably does. My school district is insane in what they have us learn, as most of the schools around us are private and we feel the need to keep up. I'm not really complaining though. It stops me from getting bored.